Phew…It’s been a long, long time. I apologize. With the holidays and work, I’ve been sticking to Facebook and Twitter for all the news you need. (By the way, don’t forget to follow me at @stephmathias for all the details.)

So, what’s been up since the last time we talked? Well, a lot. Let’s start with the big news lately.

National Women’s Soccer League

The announcement was made in the last few months that a new women’s soccer league was being formed. SO excited!

Last Friday, they allocated all of the USWNT, CanWNT and Mexico WNT. I’ll break down the USWNT allocations and you can check out the rest here in the U.S. Soccer press release.

Personally, I’m going to be rooting for all the teams (at this point, I’m more loyal to players) but Western New York Flash is right up the highway (okay, like 5 1/2 hours but still) from me so that may quickly become my home team. I’ll be interested to see what they do differently and how the squads are filled out. A big question is will the national team players maintain the same positions?

Friday at 10 AM marks the NSWL draft and this is KEY to each team. These national players can bring in the crowds but what will fill out the team? The order will be Chicago Red Stars, Washington Spirit, FC Kansas City, Sky Blue FC, Boston Breakers, WNY Flash, Seattle Reign FC and Portland Thorns FC.

I’ll be tweeting for Women’s United Football Club on Friday with all the updates so follow me there! (I’ll add the account info later tonight!)

What team is stacked? Who will you root for?

So, what else happened? Rapid fire.

FIFA Ballon d’Or: Abby Wambach won FIFA’s Player of the Year award.

Pia Sundhage won manager of the year…and of course sang her thank you to the crowd. See the video here.

USMNT Action: They finally announced the location for the March USMNT Hex game to qualify for the World Cup: Denver.

MLS: The MLS SuperDraft is tomorrow, January 17th at 11:50 AM. What will the Crew do? I can’t keep track of who is still with us or not so I’m just going to leave that at that. (Sorry, lame.)

That’s enough for now…more to come. Check out the updates Who To Follow page when you get the chance. Who should I add?